Dev Blog 30
Battlestar Galactica Online - Development Blog 30 - "5th Anniversary" 05 February 2016 Hey pilots, A blog update is coming in. The 8th February 2011 describes the day when Battlestar Galactica Online went into open beta. That means that the 5th anniversary is coming up next Monday. In order to celebrate it properly, Game Update 54 will be deployed on Monday, followed by the start of the “Twilight of the Gods” event. You will be faced with golden asteroids and special event enemies. Defeat them and trade the earned event resource, ‘uranium’, for valuable rewards in the Lab! But beware – radioactive signatures have been detected on these ships! Today’s blog: 'Previously on Battlestar Galactica Online…' Let’s have a short look back. 5 years of BSGO doesn’t just mean 4 different development teams in 3 different countries; it also means 2 different factions that unite in one great community. Regardless if Human or Cylon - you made this success possible. The last years have been tough and we’re especially thankful for the support you have shown us. At the end of 2014, the future of BSGO was quite unclear and even the 4th birthday was in danger. We’ve managed to turn the situation around and we look forward for the upcoming years. The last one and a half years were mainly focused on technical renovation and therefore in-game related content got a bit of a raw deal. Frontend (Unity), backend (Erlang), website, tutorial and, of course, the server merge, are just the pillars of that focus. But actually this has allowed us to look forward to a more stable future. With Game Update 53 we released relevant balancing changes, the first event within a 12-month period, and also the first appearance of a new ship – the Guardian Basestar, well-known from the Blood and Chrome spin-off. Game Update 53 made a difference to the ship distribution. Some old fellows came out of the dust and have been seen more since. The balance is definitely not perfect and there are some ship candidates waiting for further changes, but those can be altered with smaller tweaks. The new tutorial also showed some positive impact on the completion rates which we can build upon in the next month. Game Update 53 was a huge package and contained a lot of changes, and once more we want to thank all the testers that worked on it with us. Those efforts were enormous! We plan to have a lower focus on technical changes and therefore take more care of content-relevant topics this year. However, there will still be the US provider switch and also work on the client. There hasn’t been a proper celebration for BSGO’s previous anniversaries. But in order to celebrate the last 5 years and also the upcoming ones, we’ve decided to give you a nice challenge with a little birthday event. 'GU 54: Twilight of the Gods' Game Update 54 will focus on the Birthday event which means that no other big features will go live. Considering that the last major releases had quite long production times and were also connected to larger waiting periods, we’ve decided to shrink down the size of the upcoming releases and therefore release more frequently. The Twilight of the Gods event is driven by event NPCs and golden asteroids, both rewarding uranium which you can exchange within the Labs. Be cautious about the Hestia! This ancient ship is supposed to be armed with nuclear weaponry and guarded by heavy armor. Additionally, Artemis, Hera, Apollon and Poseidon will show up to defend the Colonial faction while Eileithyia, Ares, Demeter and Kraken will represent the Cylon side. 'Game Update 55: Bracket System' We’ve also decided to move forward on the UI side. One major change we plan to implement is reducing the noise created by the current brackets within a battle. We all know the situation when dozens of brackets turn the camera red, blue or yellow when multiple ships show up. A solid UI should be acknowledged by not being noticed – so often less UI is better in this case, as long as it provides the needed functionality. We also want to tackle another core design issue. While every other game teaches you that foes are shown in red, the Cylon side especially is treated differently in BSGO, also leading to some orientation issues for new users. We’ll soon iterate on our new variant in the test server environment to keep you in the loop quite early on and create a proper solution. 'Sector Limits Update' The sector limits also made great steps forward. But as the system is connected to all jump mechanics and moreover to individual edge cases for certain areas of the game, the development time has to be extended. We also know that the new system will need intense testing before being ready for a live release and therefore we’ll also setup several test rounds in a few weeks. Therefore, we need to look at all kinds of jumps, beacons, docked/undocked maneuvers, DRADIS missions, arena and more as well as the new capital ship limits, of course. We’ll keep you in the loop once these tests are showing up. 'Client Update' As mentioned last year, we’ve started to work on a Client version for 2016. We’ve already had discussions about the direction and a first version is currently in prototype. Aside from that, we are analyzing the range of supported operating systems and other factors to keep the update & patch times to an adequate manner. The integration of users registered on partner websites will also be part of this discussion. Right now we don’t have an ETA set for the client and many things need to be laid out, but we’ll be sure to update you on its progress in the upcoming blogs. I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog update. Have fun with the Twilight of the Gods event and see you soon again with the next changes. 5 years of BSGO – you’re an awesome community! Tobias_BP Category:Developer Blogs